Cautionary and Historic Notes

In contrast to refined and polished presentations on North American BOA pages, this part of the website is extremely rough. In fact,
it has been barely touched by humans. Computers assembled these web pages using the database of type specimens prepared by the Tropical
Andean Butterfly Diversity Project (TABDP) and a vast image collection of butterfly types
amassed by Gerardo Lamas with contributions from others.
On "regular" BOA pages we try to curate every word and every image. Every photograph is diligently tweaked and cropped to make it look its best.
Taxonomy is carefully adjusted on the basis of the latest publications and our own research. We are familiar with the territory and
most of the 5,000 species, subspecies and undescribed geographic segregates inhabiting it.

The situation with South America is quite different. From Mexico to Patagonia, the number of taxa almost triples. With close to 14,000 entities, many of which have
not been formally named, it becomes very hard to catch up. However, butterfly enthusiasts have become more and more interested in South America.
Intrigued by the diversity of habitats and butterflies and exotic tropics in general, people are looking for resources to help with identification.
Such resources are very scarce. And not because there is lack of interest, but objectively, butterflies in this part of the world are known much less,
and a lot more work is needed to catalogue and describe all their forms and varieties.

Luckily, a fundamental breakthrough was the Checklist of Neotropical Butterflies published in
2004. This long-term project spearheaded by Gerardo Lamas resulted
in an excellent compilation of available taxonomic hypotheses by the leaders in the field for each family of
butterflies. The availability of such a checklist made possible another recent international
initiative,
The Tropical Andean Butterfly Diversity Project, a collaboration between
American (North and South) and European researchers. One of TABDP's primary goals was to digitize tropical
Andean butterfly specimen locality data from multiple collections. To this
end, a database was designed that also contained images of taxa to help
identification of specimens by non-specialists. Early in the project it
became apparent that by far the most rapid approach to obtaining images
for the database was to scan an already virtually comprehensive collection
of images of neotropical butterfly taxa, that assembled by Gerardo Lamas
in Lima. Over a lifetime of research, Gerardo Lamas photographed almost
all extant primary type specimens of neotropical butterflies as the basis
for studies into the checklist. These print photographs were therefore
scanned and partly databased by TABDP, for all groups except
Dismorphiinae, Ithomiini and Hesperiidae, for which we are now seeking
additional funding. Obviously, scans from prints are different in quality
from modern digital photos. However, they represent a unique lifetime collection, diligently and
ingeniously assembled to tell the story of butterfly names
and organisms behind them. The intent behind scanning the prints was to make them available
to researchers across the globe. The scans may be viewed as illustrations
to the Lamas 2004 catalogue.

Two routes can be envisioned in making these materials available to the world. First, each image can be carefully
corrected and restored to make it look its best, all the data
double checked and errors eliminated. However, with close to 30,000 images, this process will take
several years. Alternatively, the image collection can be presented "as is",
without much manual work, with errors in data, and be made available for researchers, so the checklist may be
adjusted along the way and images corrected or replaced.
It seems like the latter route might be beneficial. There is an enormous value in quick ability to consult
(possible) type specimens behind the names.

BOA collaborated with TABDP to produce a rather refined, but almost entirely
computational compilation of the images. Not much
expert checking has taken place. The scripts
to produce the web pages are almost bug free, but various errors in databasing and matching the data to specimens
may
result in incorrect information being presented.
Thus, please consider this as the first "baby" step into South America. However, we believe
that it is a groundbreaking step. Never in the history of mankind has there been
a single source that shows essentially all extant types for Neotropical Butterfly species, neither in print, nor online. We feel privileged
and proud to present this compilation, and are very grateful to Gerardo Lamas
for his generosity. A few cautionary remarks are in order:

All web pages were generated by
computer scripts and were NOT thoroughly proofread, so errors abound.
Please be kind and report errors you see.

Taxonomic lists are based on Lamas 2004 and are being
worked on to incorporate recent changes and additions. The lists may NOT be in full
agreement with either BOA list or Lamas 2004 publication.

Some specimens with type labels may NOT be actual types, even if
they carry some sort of "type" label. In some cases this is even marked on
images as a note "not type!". Not
all syntypes are shown. Image captions were generated by a computer script and may not correspond to specimen labels. Research
diligently! Don't take what you see here on faith.

Images were NOT subjected to
manual editing, but
were resized and assembled in bulk by computer scripts.
Don't quibble about the quality of images, but enjoy this
unique privilege to see a comprehensive collection of type
specimens.

Any use of these images except for personal study, requires prior
written consent of the housing institution. We are very
fortunate to have an opportunity to display them.